


season 2, episode 3

by aut0_resp0nder



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Inspired by Welcome to Night Vale, Multi, Paranormal, Supernatural Elements, Unexplained Events, i guesS??????, oh yeah. kanayas a vampire, same vibe but people are more self-aware, thisll probably have another chapter or two but we'll see
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-27 23:23:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16229453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aut0_resp0nder/pseuds/aut0_resp0nder
Summary: there’s a city at the far end of the flat universe (actually, it’s in florida) where boys kiss boys in the deep dreary dark and girls go blind from having staring contests with solar eclipses, a city where girls get married under jade altars covered with roses and boys skin their knees and twist their ankles tumbling ass over teakettle down soft grassy hills, a city where boys play with ouija boards and girls haunt the night woods, where boys skid unsupervised on rickety bicycles through the darkened streets and girls dance the waltz on the decks of sunken ships, where girls float away over the tops of the trees and boys fling themselves into the stars to live among the gods, where boys disappear through liquid silver mirrors and girls drown themselves in crackling fire, a city where girls kill their brothers and boys hide from prowling beasts in damp basements, where boys spill hot coffee over white sheets and girls write their history papers in glitter gel pen, and those who are neither struggle through the holes of a shower drain only to end up in a ballroom, a city where nothing is ever quite as it seems.





	season 2, episode 3

it’s july. terezi pyrope drags her feet down the sidewalk, the speckled pavement still searing hot from the hours-past bright day. her hands are in her pockets, the sleeves stemming from her thick-rough sweater of teal-blue corduroy bunched and creased around her wrists. her slate-gray slacks swish as she walks, the hems shifting over the laces of her scuffed red chuck taylors. she steps on something soft, and her face crinkles in disgust--at least, until she realizes what it is, and relaxes. it might have been a fun-size candy bar, once, but the plastic wrapper is bleached pale cream by the sun and the chocolate has long since liquefied. the dark’s set in, but the humid air still feels as heavy as tepid, briny seawater in her lungs—it’s the melancholic type of light-polluted night where the trees and the asphalt and the looming silhouettes of polygon houses in rows along the street seem to be darker than the cloudy sky itself. she is quiet.

 

“i hate you, kankri vantas.”

 

it’s october. feferi peixes perches like a bird of prey on the crumbling marble head of a centuries-old tombstone. long, thick licorice-colored waves of hair float around her head like a gossamer cloud, her eyes too-bright blue and her haphazardly painted lips quirked in an enigmatic smile. a fuschia tank top sits lightly on her thin shoulders, a skirt falls to her calves, and her feet are clad in her favorite heels. a chill breeze howls through the leafless trees, the branches whipping in the currents of air like grasping hands. she places her own be-ringed and nail-polished hands on her skinny hips, the bracelets and cuffs that glitter with plastic rhinestones clacking together like wooden chimes on her forearms. she stands to her full height, cracks her knuckles, and leaps off the stone to a heavy landing on her feet next to the plot of dirt that she’s been digging through. the moon shines translucent rays onto the mound of soil. something deep within the loose dirt _moves_ , displacing crumbs of loam, and she grins.

 

kanaya maryam is ten years old when her eyes turn from jade green to ruby red.

kanaya maryam is twelve years old when her incisors sharpen into razors overnight.

kanaya maryam is thirteen years old when she stops appearing in photographs.

kanaya maryam is fifteen years old when garlic starts sending her into anaphylaxis.

kanaya maryam is sixteen years old when she passes out onto the floor in church.

kanaya maryam is seventeen years, three months, and four days old when she dies.

kanaya maryam is seventeen years, three months, and five days old when she comes back.

 

eridan ampora, a skinny boy with a streak in his hair that stands at six foot two and wears only black and grey and violent violet, knows something isn’t right where he lives. he’s conscious of the feeling of thousands of eyes like lasers on his back as he walks alone, the clipped-cut suspicious mannerisms of his parents, the girl down the road that never seems to grow older even as the years slip by. he whispers with the conspiracy theorists, tavros and aradia and meenah and karkat and john, about the tentacled lovecraftian horrors that lurk in the shadows, about the night sollux’s brother disappeared into thin air and came back different, about the reason gamzee's brother never speaks, about the noises that come from jane’s closet at night. they all talk each other down, rationalizing, telling themselves it’s nothing. privately, eridan thinks they might be onto something.

of course, they all have at least one experience they can’t find explanations for. tavros swears by the truth of his eighth-grade girlfriend’s demonic possession, aradia holds a séance on halloween night where she speaks to the entire junior class with the gravelly voice of jade harley’s dead grandfather, meenah raves at lunch about how her sister’s plants scream high and shrill when she prunes them, karkat calls him urgently at midnight hissing into the phone about his own heavy footsteps creaking up the wooden stairs while he’s curled up in bed, john tells him under his breath in history class that he saw terezi pyrope take out her contacts yesterday and her eyes were _red_ , eridan, i swear to god, all the way through with no sclera or pupil. eridan himself shares stories of fangs marring the mouth of his next-door neighbor and witnessing his friend splitting herself into four separate nepetas when she thought she was alone.

 

“i’m hard to scare, serket, always have been.”

“yeah, i know.”

“so whatcha doin’ here lookin’ like that?”

 

something’s up with the strider-lalondes. everyone knows it, even if nobody voices their concerns. the whole family is just so reclusive, standoffish, tight-knit and secretive--at least, most of them are--that it only makes sense for them to be hiding something. their parents are never seen, and most think they live alone. but beyond that, all the siblings are just so….weird.

 

the girl with the blank eyes who sees the auras says, “it’s funny. whenever i look at the twins, they don’t have separate colors. or, separate aspects, i guess. it’s just one big one.” her voice is raspy.

the boy with the crooked teeth who hears the ghosts says, “well, i mean, it’s not like you’d ever get the chance to see them separately anyway.” he has a lisp.

“yeah, i guess. still, they should be different colors. nobody’s that similar, not even those weirdos.”

“not even mituna and latula?”

“nope. latula’s is just solid mint, mituna’s is this pretty dark greenish color like yours. dirk and hal’s are both this weird kind of shifting sludge, like the color you’d get if you mixed teal and maroon.”

“huh. weird. it’s like they’re the same person.”

“haha, yeah.”

their laughter is nervous.

 

it’s forever one long, sticky summer in miami, where the thick heat chokes the breath from your lungs and the body-warm, algae-riddled seawater stands in stagnant pools around your mosquito-bitten ankles, where it’s so humid the sidewalks don’t dry when it rains and you can still skid through puddles the size of dinner plates on the road days after a heavy storm. it’s the kind of weather meenah peixes loves.  
she loves to swim, miles every day. her hair flows out behind her in the water like ink dispersing on tea-stained paper, and she fucks up the untouched seabed six ways to sunday with the careful movement of her tanned and polished toes against it. 

of course, the gill slits concealed with ace bandages under her ribs and on the sides of her collarbone help with her swimming stamina.

 

“i don’t see where he could have gone and come back so quickly. it’s not like he was kidnapped.”

“he was soaking wet when he showed back up. almost scared latula out of her skin, thought he was some kind of swamp monster.”

“so he got to the ocean? jesus. it’s bad enough we’re right on the triangle, who knows what could have happened.” 

 

it’s the thin tail end of november, and five fifteen-year-old kids stand dizzy-headed and starry-eyed on the edge of a rocky and steep cliff. it’s cold, but not florida-cold. it’s cold like winter in maine, the kind of cold when the air freezes the moisture in the air before they can even form proper snowflakes, sending whirling flurries of chipped ice whizzing into the crunchy dirt. jane crocker’s close-cropped glitter-snow hair whips around her tan, heart-shaped face like dropped licorice snaps bouncing down the sidewalk, stray scraps of litter brush against and catch on the divots of jake english’s bony ankles, roxy lalonde stands with her arms crossed and the tops of her shoulders dusted with ice next to dirk and hal strider with their elbows bent and arms linked tight like chains and barely-there clouds of crystallized breath rising from their mouths. none of them move; they simply stare, unblinking, unceasing even as the cold-lit sun begins to set and all five of them are wracked with shivers, at the swirling sea far far below. all their eyes are curiously bare; jane and jake’s nearsightedness seemingly forgotten, and the twins’ usual matching sunglasses absent from their faces, revealing their identical ruby-amber eyes. nothing appears to them, for better or for worse. the only thing present on the frost-glazed path are the five children, standing motionless for exactly one hour and eleven minutes as the winter storm howls around them. an arbitrary number, jane crocker thinks later, but she’s wrong.

only the second roxy’s watch strikes 1:00 am do they break, falling from their statue-trance like blocks of crumbling marble, clinging to each other in a feeble attempt to chase the permeating chill from their windburnt skin. jane falls into roxy collapses into jake just barely manages to stay upright, barely manages to catch himself on firm planted feet before all three of them topple over the sheer bluff. hal and dirk—both in thin t-shirts—clutch at each other’s bare skin, thin arms wrapping around each other like spiderwebs, trying to stave off the unnaturally icy wind. they all share glances; how exactly, did they get here? how, exactly, did jane and jake slip out of their thin-walled house without john and jade waking up? how, exactly, did roxy and the twins make it all the way to this rocky cliff they had never seen before without getting lost? jane purses her lips, roxy blows a breath out between her teeth. jake twists his hands together nervously. dirk and hal look at each other—and suddenly, there is movement. dirk extends a hand, brushing his fingers against roxy’s chilly forearm, snapping it back around his twin’s waist as soon as his sister turns her gaze to them. she steps forward, and both of them whisper something in her ear as jane and jake watch with apprehension. 

“we gotta get home.” roxy’s words are slurred with exhaustion and cold, her voice sticking on her consonants. “‘s too cold to be out here without coats an’ shit.” jake nods tersely, absently rubbing his biceps with his palms in an effort to flatten the goosebumps that had risen there. jane starts walking with no comment, as does roxy a moment later. the twins trail behind. they are silent all the way home, jane and jake parting ways at the forking of their street. none of them notice that the biting wind follows them, and that the unseasonal snow melts as soon as it’s out of their radius.

roxy sleeps with the twins that night, not wanting to be alone. 

seven blocks away, jake sits awake in his bed, jane curled up next to him. 

in the morning, they avoid each other at school.

 

something’s wrong in this city.  
it makes itself obvious in the smallest of ways—in the just slightly arrhythmic tolling of the church bells, in the way the seasons have no schedule and the concrete jungle swallows wayward children, in the way that if you look at the brackish sea in just the right light the sandy bottom seems to fall out from under you, in the way that people sometimes grow fangs (kanaya) or poorly-concealed wings (rufioh).

vriska knows it too, he thinks; every time he brings it up (a challenge, really, everyone knows that in the movies the skeptics are the first to kick the bucket) her cobalt-chip eyes go squinty with recognition and her fingers curl into tense fists upon the table. he can see it in her, the feeling that something is just a little bit _off_ swimming through her veins like fish in her bodily sea, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders in too-perfect metronome ringlets. he looks at her for a long moment through tinted glasses as she sits uncharacteristically quiet in the passenger seat of his car before his car runs over something, the tire audibly popping with a low, ominous _thunk-pshhhhh_.

“fuck!” 

“god damn it, sollux!” and the aberrant moment is shattered, she’s back to her old grating self.

“i’m sorry, jesus!”

“what _was_ that?”

“how am i supposed to know?”

“then go check!”

“fine!”

she shoves him good-naturedly out of the car, his mismatched converse sneakers losing traction on the smooth waxed exterior before he rights himself and stands up on the pavement. he curiously walks around the car to the back wheel—

“oh, shit.”

a severed hand with claws for nails is wedged under sollux captor’s car tire.

 

jade harley is not a witch.  
_jade harley worships the devil._  
jade harley is not a witch.  
_jade harley speaks to demons._  
jade harley is not a witch.  
_jade harley raises the dead._  
jade harley is not a witch.

 

“what if we ran away?”

“what, just packed up and left? just fuckin’ ghosted? we’re barely seventeen, is that even legal?”

“i dunno. i still wanna do it.”

“...you know what? sure. but see if megido’s down.”

“oh my god, are you forreal?”

“yeah. hurry up and call aradia before i change my mind.”

 

rose lalonde is a witch. that much, everyone can understand. there’s just something about her demeanor that carries an eldritch aura. her hair is the color of hollow gold and her skin holds an iridescent, otherworldly pallor, the freckles that dusted her face when she was young wiped away ( makeup or magic?) and her deep blue-violet eyes flashing far too brightly than is normal. crowds part in front of her as she walks, and when she’s irritated smoke seems to rise from her fingertips. she never seems to notice, and somehow that’s even scarier.

her brother, dave strider, outwardly, is average. he’s not especially tall or short, skinny or heavy, toned or scrawny. but if you take a closer peek, every inch of his skin is crisscrossed with what looks like a thicket of wide, twisted scars, so numerous as to make his skin appear unblemished. he covers his eyes with a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses just a little too big for his thin face, wears only long sleeves and jeans (even in the torrid florida summers), is always fidgeting. there’s tricks to getting him to open up, of course; ask him about karkat vantas or aradia megido and his face lights up in a smile, ask him about vriska serket and it falls like an imploding building. he never raises his voice, no matter how much prodding he endures.

then there’s the two older strider boys. the twins. dirk and hal, they’re the strangest in that family, most people agree. they’re identical, carbon copies, sharing everything to the point of dependency. each of them is never seen without the other, and they’re always somehow touching--keeping their hands tightly clasped, standing with their arms laced and close enough for their shoulders to press together, legs crossed and twisted, both curling into one chair with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders--as though they’d wither into nothing if they were to be wrenched apart. maybe they _would_ —the romantics theorize they share a soul. they’re famous for their dual thousand-yard stares and they hardly ever speak except to hiss hurried words in each other’s ears, usually followed by the kind of mean laughter that follows an unpleasant joke. (aranea tells everyone that meulin heard their whispers one day, and that’s why she went deaf. nobody’s disproved it.) 

roxy lalonde, the oldest, is the outlier. friendly and bubbly and outgoing, her curly hair pixie-pink and her knee socks patterned with cat heads, always flashing her famous 35-megawatt grin. (kanaya’s sister says she’s the only one that dirk and hal ever talk to besides each other.) she’s intense, cheerful, caring, and decidedly the most utterly bubblegum normal out of all of five siblings, which is a little funny. there has to be something unorthodox about her, and in an ordinary situation, not much about roxy lalonde and her family could ever be considered normal. 

 

the summer before senior year when they are seventeen years old, karkat vantas, dave strider, and aradia megido go missing. they disappear at night, into seemingly thin air. with them they take: karkat’s two-year-old thundercloud-gray pickup truck, four duffel bags of clothing, an industrial flashlight with a change of batteries, a half-empty bottle of diet dr. pepper, a 38-caliber smith and wesson revolver, a hairbrush, twelve candles in twelve different colors, a cigarette lighter, three pairs of shoes, a jumbo-sized black sharpie, a bag of cheap makeup, three lengths of iron chain to wear as necklaces, aradia’s baseball cap, a butterfly net, dave’s wallet and phone, karkat’s wallet and phone, aradia’s wallet and phone, a louisville slugger, a claw hammer, a pair of earbuds, two pillows, a thick down comforter, a battered and dog-eared copy of twenty thousand leagues under the sea, and six thousand four hundred thirteen dollars in cash.

they do not come back for two years. they do not call. they do not write. rumors fly; _they’re in washington with the president, they’re in michigan at the bottom of the lake, they’re in nevada at the casinos, they’re in arizona at the grand canyon_. cronus says he sees aradia perched high in a mangrove tree in the everglades—nobody believes him.

when they finally return, they are different. their eyes are bigger and brighter, their hair thicker and curlier and their skin paler, their faces unlined yet holding far more than their flimsy nineteen years of life experience. (one has to wonder what, exactly, they did for two whole years.) karkat is devoid of freckles, and dave’s many scars are gone. they are all at least six inches taller, their limbs thinner and their bodies more willowy. they kiss and touch freely, a change from the almost-painful tension between the three of them before they’d left--aradia wraps around the two boys like a serpent, drawing them together and into her like she’s made of melting wax. they come back, also, with a finer-tuned sense of anomaly in their city.

 

upon return, dave avoids his brothers and sisters. he has reason—dirk and hal are both terribly frightening forces, their eyes heavy and their words laden with unheard power. they wield control over their surroundings others do not see, and their canine teeth are sharper than they used to be. rose is almost worse, routinely playing with things she doesn’t understand, a pool of malevolence bubbling up within her gone unnoticed for far too long. and roxy… well, roxy just has awful taste in music.


End file.
